Jimmy Page couldn’t play guitar properly on the final Led Zeppelin tours due to his drug and alcohol use, Twisted Sister guitarist Jay Jay French claimed recently on the Cassius Morris Show.
“I saw Zeppelin many, many, many times, and they got worse as time went on. That was the real story about Zeppelin – drugs and alcohol had its effect on Jimmy [Page], so as the years went by, they deteriorated. ’69, ’70, ’71, ’72, ’73, they were amongst the greatest bands you would ever want to see live – your mouth would fall open. You’d watch John Bonham play drums, you just – your jaws are dropped.
Come ’75, Robert’s [Plant] voice starts deteriorating a bit, and Jimmy’s playing starts to deteriorate. There’s plenty of stuff online to prove it, and I’m not saying this with any glee, trust me. By ’77, on their last tour – here we are in 1977, Twisted is one of the biggest bar bands in the Tri-State Area, and a friend of ours is a ticket broker, and he gave us four tickets to give away for one of our shows.
We couldn’t give tickets away to Zeppelin in 1977 because nobody wanted to see them. If you were a kid in Long Island and you wanted to hear Zeppelin, you’d go see Zebra, this band Zebra, because they did Zep better than Zep, and they were phenomenal. And you go, ‘Why would I waste my time seeing this band that can’t play Zeppelin songs?’ So we couldn’t give tickets away.
I had four tickets to see Zep at the Garden, I couldn’t give them away, but I went, I went with some friends, and we’re all sitting there bored to death. I swear to god, I spent three hours watching John Bonham play drums because I couldn’t listen to this, but this is a byproduct of my age.”
Despite Page’s struggles, he managed to survive, while his bandmate John Bonham died in 1980, ending Led Zeppelin for good outside of select reunion shows, with the last being in 1980.
Page discussed an underappreciated gem of his a few days ago on social media, writing, “On this day in 1985, the Michael Winner film ‘Scream For Help’ was released.
John Paul Jones had been drafted in to do the soundtrack and he asked me to play on it. We wrote ‘Crack Back’ and ‘Spaghetti Junction’ and both pieces appeared in the film and soundtrack album.”
